Texts:Rom-E-68b-E-Pur-7

Purposes
Eight Reflective Essays

7—Competence

7:¶1

There are sufficient examples of excellence among professional educators; what we lack as a group is thorough competence. This competence should be our goal, for it is the most demanding goal we can set ourselves.

7:¶2

In recent years enough has been said about excellence and education. By now, many recognize that in one sense excellence is too easy a goal: given any range of accomplishment with a particular skill, there always are those who excel by their proximity to the higher extreme of the range. What matters for all who are spread out along the curve of distribution is not so much the placement of the extremes, but the placement of the curve itself; and the pursuit of excellence is less likely to raise the general level of the curve as is the pursuit of competence. With a high level of competence, the laggards are continually pulled along and the geniuses are continually pushed to better performances. There are sufficient examples of excellence among professional educators; what we lack as a group is thorough competence. This competence should be our goal, for it is the most demanding goal we can set ourselves.

7:¶3

Be assured that in commending competence as our goal I am not in the least advising that we lessen what we expect of ourselves. Competence is a hard, tough matter, especially when one looks honestly at the accumulated deficiencies. The difficulties posed by the pursuit of competence would be cause for despair, if it were not for the fact that competence is a pre-eminently open quality; a community can build up its competence rather quickly because it is open to every man to assert his better self in favor of his lesser, to sharpen his powers, to perfect his competence in his chosen sphere of endeavor. Because competence is open to those who assert their will for it, the blacks can wisely taunt complacent whitey. But here, as in all other areas, the images of quick success, of visible excellence, are a danger to substantial progress.

7:¶4

There is a snare and delusion in the pursuit of excellence: too often excellence is measured by applause, acclaim, and notoriety; excellence becomes the equivalent of success in the eyes of the mediocre. True excellence in contrast is a matter of excelling oneself; it is an inward, hidden quality that surprises, and even outrages, the spectators with unexpected accomplishments. This honest excellence is never a public goal; certain men properly present it gratuitously to their peers as a fait accompli. But the ubiquitous cant about excellence serves as an unction by means of which we avoid facing up to our serious tasks. The rhetoricians of the marketplace have decisively degraded our idea of excellence, for every good and service sold excels all others in its class; and hence, until our deeds can give renewed meaning to the word, we had best cease mouthing it.

7:¶5

Consequently, in our time the heroic quest is not of the oft-spoken unspeakable; it is the quest of competence. To develop competence one must embark on a true odyssey: over years of journeying one must resist and rebound from many dangers. On one side there is Charybdis, that terrible vortex of ever-narrowing concentration at the center of which is nothingness; to avoid this monster, the earnest voyager steers too far to the other side where he meets Scylla, the rock of silliness upon which heady ambitions are grounded and broken. And on the way to these twin dangers are the Sirens, "and about them is a great heap of bones and mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shrivelling." Thus, publicity hungers to taunt every pretense, and the quiet shaping of one's powers depends on having sufficient fortitude to hold one's course while lesser men are hailed as Homeric heroes; Ulysses had learned of this matter from experience, for he had driven Ajax to frenzied despair by besting the latter's competence with rhetorical cunning. But rhetoric alone will always end by out-witting itself; and instead, it is time to sing the praises of the man whose powers are in proportion with his pretense, for he has become a truly uncommon character.

7:¶6

With the tension between pretense and competence, we encounter one of the more hopeful aspects in the surly mood of youth: in the long-run, immature iconoclasm may put a premium on competence over pretense. So far we have simply a pretentious rebellion against pretense, but we can expect more than that from the matter. Prior to the advent of affluence, wealth was the most common mark of attainment. Parents of middling class and age still believe in the significance of this mark; and finding themselves seemingly wealthy, they put on airs and congratulate themselves for their attainments. Their children, however, get around more; they travel about the country and the world, and they soon realize that at once the well-to-do are legion and out-standing problems are manifold. As a result, these youths find that the possession of wealth in-and-of itself signifies nothing; they conclude consequently that pretenses based on wealth alone indicate an estrangement from the realities of the time, a mark of incompetence, not mastery; and they suggest idealistically that in place of the wealth itself, more discriminating measures should be recognized, measures that take into account the way the wealth was produced and the quality of the lives it helps support. Now although we have seen so far on the horizon of history only the ephemeral avant garde of this development; we are likely to witness, once the current game of denial becomes dull, a great demand by critical youths for elementary competence.

7:¶7

This demand is the one that will truly test the mettle of our educational institutions; and as the young begin to assert higher and higher standards of competence—not standards of mere efficiency, but standards of full, humane competence—they will put tremendous pressure on the reigning dogma of pedagogical presentism, a dogma that has done more than anything else in past decades to diminish our sense of competence. Of course, if one is satisfied merely to project present trends mechanically into the future, it will seem nonsense to foresee the demise of presentism in the name of competence. But in history, reason does not always follow the law of inertia.

7:¶8

What we see so far in the rebellions of the young is the reduction of the presentist doctrine to an absurdity. But one can already sense a shift in certain activists who began in the name of involvement in the holy Now: slowly they are ceasing to question the desirability of educational institutions in the absolute; having discovered the importance of the institution, they are starting to examine critically the competence of its parts. Judging by decible count, these constructive critics are in a minority; but as Heraclitus said, it is a foolish man who is aflutter with every word. Historically, in situations of social ferment, the moderate wing of radical movements by no means always, or even usually, becomes dominant. In this case, however, there are certain practical and doctrinal realities that make constructive reform towards greater competence the likely long-term result of campus upheavals.

7:¶9

Once established ways have been disrupted, power—both material and spiritual—gravitates towards those who have both a clear intuition of a possible, new stability and the mastery of the means needed to bring this vision into actuality. In the Russian revolution, such vision and competence were developed by Lenin and his followers, who were rather far out on the revolutionary extreme. In the French revolution, these qualities were manifested, less completely to be sure, by Napoleon, who appealed to the desire for stability. Thus, in unstable situations, the assignation of power does not follow the dictates of doctrine or inheritance, but of competence; then careers are truly open to talent. To estimate what will happen when ingrained habits are upset, one should dispassionately weigh the ideas and abilities of different groups in an effort to perceive which one has the qualities that will best enable it to formulate and carry through a vision of a viable future. Such an estimate will show that the exponents of pedagogical presentism are noisy, but inherently weak, for whether they favor the extreme of destruction or stasis, the bias of their beliefs ill-equips them to create a significant future.

7:¶10

Pedagogical presentists hold that educational effort should be measured neither by models from the past nor by hopes for the future; on the contrary, the standards controlling aims and activities should be immanent in the immediate pedagogical situation, they should emanate from the present aims and abilities of the child, and they should never involve a tyrannical imposition of abstract models on the sacred mystery of flesh and blood. There is much of merit in this doctrine. Its greatness came early in this century when educational reformers used it to call their peers away from the pursuit of sterile practices. But that which serves as a refreshing tonic does not always work as a daily drink; and despite the reiterations of those who long ago ceased to listen critically while they themselves were speaking, pedagogical presentism is now established doctrine throughout academe. It, too, shows signs of sterility.

7:¶11

Pedagogical disagreements have been resulting in polarized positions because both sides give lip-service to the same principles, those of the ruling presentism, making it impossible for the rational discussion of divergent principles to serve as an indirect basis for resolving the conflict. Thus the proponent of the multiversity holds that the university has no integral mission; it is instead an ever-changing conglomeration of competing interests that hic et nunc represent the immediate intellectual consensus. So be it: the presentist multiversity engenders an equally presentist "antiversity" composed of those who are convinced that the multiversity does not represent the present consensus and who are going to prove it by destroying hic et nunc what seems to them to be a mere vestige of vested interests. Likewise, in the urban school crises, there is a similar synthesis of polar opposites in pure presentism. Proponents of both teacher power and parent power have given up crusading for grand ideals; they are equally convinced that pedagogical policy should not follow intrinsic principles, but should instead respond to the interests of the dominant group, and with this conviction there arises the urge to make one's own group dominant. In these ways presentism has helped to bring about the recent polarizations; but it is ill-designed to point towards any further possibilities beyond the confrontations.

7:¶12

Pedagogical presentism received its fullest statement at the time of its highest vitality in the work of John Dewey. In his presentation of what has come to be dogma, we find the flaw that makes the doctrine unsuitable for leading us beyond destructive oppositions. Dewey had a lively sympathy for the fact that we live always in an immediate present; and he used this fact effectively against those who tried to force living reality to conform to the image of a dead past or of an impossible future. Thus, he argued powerfully that education ought to be neither a continual reincarnation of classical norms nor a preparation for a distant future. Most of us would probably agree in opposing the tendencies that Dewey described and condemned as obnoxious; but the eventual weakness of Dewey's presentism was rooted in his careless attitude towards the authentic past and future, in his willingness to make straw men of his opponents, and in his resulting failure to incorporate the best portion of their positions into his own.

7:¶13

Dewey held himself to an inadequate standard of competence. His positive position was well thought out and basically sound; but like his prose, his negations were slack and did not serve to brace his assertions. This self-indulgence is endemic to the presentists of all sorts; it is the spiritual source of their historic weakness. An emblem of the situation can be found in Democracy and Education where Dewey tried to set off the presentist position from the futurist's sense of preparation and the classicist's conception of recapitulation. Only dumb doctrinaires would hold the positions that Dewey described under these heads, and he failed to grapple with the pedagogies of preparation and recapitulation at their best. What is important in these conceptions is not, as Dewey had it, preparation for an abstract future, nor the recapitulation of an abstract past. Both past and future exist in the present; it is precisely the two together that give form to the present. Dewey erred in seeking to dissociate his doctrine from those of preparation and recapitulation, for to develop any substantial force in the real world, he should have sought to incorporate both into his theory.

7:¶14

Men truly develop their possibilities when they develop in their living present an authentic vision of the future. Moved by this aspiration, they begin to prepare for fulfilling it; they recognize that they cannot bring it to actuality if they are content with their present abilities and accomplishments. Having become discontent with the given, they begin to cast around for other possibilities, at which point the past, the authentic past that comes to life in our consciousness, begins to grow and become more meaningful. Thus, men who are now working towards tomorrow find inspiration in past accomplishments that, they realize, differ from present actualities; and these men use the standards of the past as a lever by means of which they can raise their performance out of the rut of the present's inertia. Hence, it is by an alliance in the present of the future and the past that men develop for themselves standards of competence by which they can change their overall level of performance.

7:¶15

But by asserting presentist doctrine in the continual present of life, one puts before oneself ideas that are not the most conducive to human development. The great theorem of human growth is "Future plus Past equals Present," that is, the quality of the present that one is living is a function of the future from which one is drawing one's aspirations and of the past from which one receives one's inspirations. By insisting overzealously, exclusively on the obvious—that we live in the present tense—Dewey and other presentists cut the heart and the head, the living hope and the living remembrance, from the vital process. This heartlessness, or lack of vision, and this mindlessness, or deficiency of carefully cultivated abilities, are together the historic realities that will make the presentists exponents of either the multiversity or the antiversity ineffective against the reformist proponents of a university composed of more competent persons.

Robert Oliver
Teachers College Record (vol. 70, no. 7, April 1969)